


Phantom Pain

by lieutenant_isaac



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Storytelling, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-27
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 07:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29730708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieutenant_isaac/pseuds/lieutenant_isaac
Summary: Twelve years in Nunavut fail to bring Francis Crozier any closer to oblivion.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 37





	Phantom Pain

1\. 

For a long time he feels nothing. There are only sensations – the cold, mostly, the different kinds of cold: dry, crisp, petting, mild, wet, and the sick unreasoning cold of the deep winter. But there is also the softness of fur, an aging knee kneeling on the ice, the phantom pain that he feels beyond the stump of his hand. He’s heard about phantom limbs, but he didn’t realize they would be so detailed. This, he reflects, must have been why his friend (what was his name? He of the matted gray hair, the first expression he’d ever recognized as a “grin”) found it so easy to walk, even to run, with his new leg made of leather and wood. 

These parenthetical thoughts, split thoughts, keep breaking into him now. And the language is a wreck. He remembers the leg ( _made of leather and wood, of wood, of wood and leather_ ), but not the name. Or else the name comes back to him in the dark, when he is watching the roof of the tent. It is in insomnia that he remembers the names, his and others’; when he remembers chess and wool and God; when he feels most like himself. The insomnia, like the stiff pink body that houses it, does not change. 

But it doesn’t matter. He has found trust here, with the people he lives with now. They trust him to kill a seal or look after a child, or even to give certain kinds of advice about friendship or wind, but they don’t trust him to make a decision that affects someone else. So if he is so tired sometimes that he feels drunk, so tired that he forgets the new language along with the old, it doesn’t matter. Nobody needs him here.

2\. 

After his friend is gone ( _Sir James Clark Ross, RN_ ; he can play at forgetting names, but Ross’ name is always there, it is work), he begins to feel something. The feeling comes in a minor key, played in the next room on a hesitant piano. With it he remembers pianos and rooms. He knows that this tune, having begun, will run through the stiff pink body and the insomnia until he dies. He will try to forget it and fail, because there is only one thing that has made him forget anything, and there is none of it here.

For he knows he isn’t abstaining now because he has the strength for it. There have been many days when, if he could have drunk himself to sleep or death, he would have. He tries to tell himself that the taste of alcohol belonged to the man who is gone, and even if he feels more like that man by the day, a sharp feeling like rising bile, he is no longer him. But day by day, he knows he is wrong.

He cannot go back to the cold and the fur and the lack of feeling. Instead there is a restlessness now, and a desire to tell stories, as the other people do in the evening when there is no more work to do. He feels the depth of their literature, how many layers and currents travel through it. Things that happened to the speaker, but also funny things, interesting polished tidbits brought up from under ice, cautionary tales, children’s tales, dreams. 

He is reluctant to speak – he sees how these stories last, how they are passed around – but in the end he cannot resist. He secretly loves telling an anecdote, and is even more secretly proud of his skill at it, and this little bobble of secrets has remained within the stiff pink body like all the rest. And so one night in the big tent, he tells the story of his exploits with James Ross in Antarctica, and the night they had saved their ships from collision among the ice.

No one is interested. Some of them first met James twenty years ago, when he sailed north with his uncle and was also called Aglooka by the locals. They know his beauty and wit and dash. But the story of the two Aglookas is received politely, no more. He tries again a few times, but he knows he is missing something fundamental about how his new friends identify a story – something beyond plot, pacing, and all the other things whose style he can imitate. They are watching him carve wood into a rectangle and call it a novel.

The only audience he finds is among the children who live with them, ranging from a boy of ten to a toddler girl who shrieks and coos at his beard. They all love his stories, can’t get enough of them in fact, and they love to ask for explanations of what cows are, what the South Sea Islands are, what people ate and drank at all the parties. He obliges them, although each sliver of reference drives him away from what he wants: from the nothing-feeling, from the milky emptiness that he can now only find when he is fishing or hunting or looking out to the sea. Eventually, he realizes that the children are not really curious about his past or the wider world. They regard what he says as a feat of imagination, like the writings of Poe. This is a relief to him. He doesn’t want them to want to know his land, to dream of his land. He wants them innocent of it. England is cruel, and Ireland – Ireland is _his_.

When he has finished with all the interesting, violent, or funny episodes that he is willing to tell of his life, he begins to tell the tales of James Fitzjames. These are even more successful with the children. At first, he tells them well, with lighter and heavier moments and rising and falling action, but one night, because it pleases him, he tells James’ story of being shot by the Chinese, and recreates the whole performance in all its operatic boredom. He prods at his chest to show the paths of bullets; he reaches for little objects to represent the position of a cannon. He still has the whole thing memorized. The children are rapt. 

He does not bring up the politics or the wars that James fought, the names of the countries. James barely did either. He only told of muscles and materiel, how James had thrown his loved ecstatic body on one weapon after another. Encouraged by his success, he tells the children about Birdshit Island, and the crowning of the Greek king, and the time James had hauled a riverboat overland to the Euphrates. The opportunity to mock at James makes him come apart inside; he can only talk behind James’ back now, never to his face. Yet he cannot seem to stop. He tells of him again and again, until even the children get bored. He wants to repeat these things so often that they once again mean nothing, but it doesn’t work.

3\. 

The day is warm when the band crosses paths with a smaller band, this one only a few families, their belongings scant and damaged. They have had a starvation summer, lured north by the fine weather, then sent south by bad hunting. The new people camp with him and his friends, and introduce themselves: Uluriaq, Osuitok, Sivatkaluk. The meetings are cautious at first – bad blood between the groups – but the new people are in such a piteous condition that it’s difficult to keep up the feud. 

One of the middle-aged men of the group hangs back from the others, and when the two of them finally speak – late in the evening, in a tent whose other occupants have gradually left – he says to Aglooka, “My name is Crozier. Do you remember me?”

He studies the man’s shy, intelligent face. He does remember him; he says, “We exchanged names once.”

“Yes.”

“I was very young. Your people approached my ship and talked to us. We gave you – some trash, beads and mirrors.”

“It cost us very little,” says the man called Crozier. “It was interesting.”

“Do you really still use my name?”

“Sometimes.”

“I use your name all the time now.”

They sit in silence and look at the burning pan of fat at the center of the room. It has burnt low.

“Well,” says Crozier, swinging to his feet, “I thought you might like to know.”

“Thank you,” he says. That night he looks at the fire until it is exhausted, and then goes to sleep outside, on a fur, holding the stump of his hand, as this sometimes helps with the sensation and the pain. He wonders what else he will learn, and if he will ever find his way back to the empty place, and how much he might like to die. It’s no good hoping, though. The stiff pink body does its work, and it will hold his soul upright, as it always has. He knows that living will honor the dead. He just doesn’t know why it hurts so much.

4\. 

“How do I find emptiness again?” he asks Inuksak, the hunter, as they sit at the fire. It has taken him three years to learn a word for _emptiness_.

Inuksak looks unsurprised; he has not been visibly taken aback since the day of Aglooka’s arrival in the camp, when he heard that his crews were dead. He says, “What emptiness?”

“The one you helped me find when you told me to accept.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Aglooka shifts himself on the floor of the tent. “When I came here, you gave me a piece of excellent advice. You told me that everyone accepted Silna’s exile. You told me to remember where I was and accept it too.”

“Yes,” says Inuksak. “But that wasn’t advice. That was a warning about your behavior.”

“Still, it helped me to wake up each day and think, once again, of how to accept this. It helped me to be empty. To – ” He pauses, tries to find a gesture of the hand, but cannot. “To forget the life I had before.” He feels his stiff tongue pressing at the inside of his cheek as he thinks again, searches for the language he’d thought he had mastered.

“As I said, it wasn’t advice. You were acting wrong.” Inuksak takes up the amulet he has been carving, and holds it to the firelight. It’s a caribou; her face is stylized into something smooth and leonine, and she has no antlers, but he recognizes her by her legs, which are poised in flight. “Since then you’ve acted better, and that’s why you’re still here. You thought that by accepting, you could forget?”

“Yes.”

“But they’re the opposite of each other.”

“Are they?”

“Look,” says Inuksak, and he slides the amulet over to him; he takes it up, unsure if it’s a gift or if Inuksak only wishes him to admire his work. He looks back up at the other man. “When you met us, you imagined our land was empty, because it’s not full of your people. Since then, you’ve noticed how full it is. The ones that dwell, right?” The word he uses is “inuat.”

“My people call it a _soul_.”

“So everyone knows about it,” Inuksak agrees. “You didn’t see the _souls_ around us. Now you do. You’re wiser now. I never gave you advice before, and I’m not giving you any now, especially not about how to become less wise.”

“I used to think I was wise, Inuksak. Because I knew about ice. And men.”

“Your men didn’t die because you were unwise,” says Inuksak. “You’re not. They died because none of you knew anything.”

“Then why did I live?” This is, he finds, the real question.

Inuksak shrugs. “Luck, Aglooka.”

He takes the amulet, puts it into the hidden pocket of his parka along with the carving of his ship. The two of them have a satisfying weight. If Inuksak didn’t mean to give it to him, he also doesn’t mind his taking it; he watches him for a moment, then pulls out a new piece of ivory to begin a new carving. It is spring, and they are still camped on the ice. The evening has been dark for hours, but it is not yet time to rest. Outside, he stands looking at the blue moonlight, and takes the charms out once again. They rest neatly in the palm of his hand. 

When Inuksak had first passed him the tiny boat, he had felt bilious rage: had Silna carved him this dismasted thing, this limping animal, to say she was _sorry_ for him? Later, he’d seen that he was wrong. Silna was – somewhere, he hopes, is – a fine person. She is principled, strategic, determined to help the most people that she can: a Jeremy Bentham in furs. But she does not suffer from excess of pity, as he has suffered from fatal excess of pity, for both his men and himself. She made this for him to give him the strength of _Terror_ , to make him tough, resolute, caring; also to remind him that he is ill-governed and that the men entrusted to him are dead.

5.

It is still summer on Qikiqtaq, what he used to call King William Land, and he joins the parties searching for caribou and fish. Inuksak is right, he thinks. He had imagined this place was empty and clean, that if nothing else it had the virtue of the empty and clean, but there is so much detail in the land, and the people are so adept at scouring it for life. He imagines the very stones of the island popped into human mouths, savored like salt. The land has become real to him in the way that, once, an opera house full of people was real to him.

The first summer here – the year after his crews had died – he’d drawn the emptiness around him to avoid the sight of sledges of material from the abandoned camps being brought in. He recognized a spoon of his own, a chest of Goodsir’s (still part-full of medicines), but mostly the Netsilik brought practical things: canvas, tentpoles, tools, unrotted ropes that had been stowed in chests, spare blankets and clothing. There were books, too, which were given to the children as toys. 

The children loved the paper, sun-bleached and dust-stained; they loved to tear out each page and feel the give of the paper against the spine. Watching them, he’d admired the seriousness with which they did this. He’d rescued a few novels from the children before they’d had a chance to destroy them, had turned over their pages, but had found that he could barely read them. His finer eyesight was failing him, and he was exhausted by the sharp turns and the wit of the stories, the archness, the Englishness. It was like climbing a slender staircase of endless switchbacks, with no obvious goal at the top. He gave them back to the children in the end, and Inuksak told him in disbelief: “You wanted this, and now you don’t like it.”

“No one likes the things that they wanted,” he’d countered.

Inuksak had paused, mulling this, but then said, “You’re used to being rich. If you’re not rich, you don’t think like that.”

Now there is nothing in the camps but clothed bones and collapsed tents: no metal, wood, or leather remains. Each summer that they return here and he comes across a body, he’s certain that he will bury the bones, but each time, he cannot. It is not out of disgust, but out of pity. He looks at what little remains of Jopson, or Goodsir, or that good man Bridgens, and that pity suffuses him, again, again. He cannot bear to leave them all alone. He can see the landscape taking them, scattering the bones and pulling them apart, consumed by animals, stone among other stone. The sight is not horrible.

6\. 

He wakes up, panicked, to the sharp sound of a white man’s voice. He feels upside down, hung to dry: for years, his campmates have kept the English and the Americans from him, but now they have come without warning. He hears a sledge, and the voice is saying, “Hannah, find the chief. Speak to the chief for me.”

He rolls over and draws his hood over his head. He assumes that the man Hannah will find is Inuksak, and he knows he will delay them and give Aglooka time to slip away. Since Inuksak speaks for the community, and since he is intelligent and decisive, strangers often assume that he (or anyone) is in charge.

He has been lucky in finding people who keep to themselves. People marry in or out of the camp, and sometimes nearby groups, like Crozier’s, will travel with them for a time, but largely he has found that the band is unfriendly to other Inuit. This keeps them disconnected from the network of gossip which the English and Americans follow in their relentless search for Franklin’s men. But it seems his luck has come to an end, for a woman – an Inuit woman, with an intelligent and dainty air – has bent to glance into the tent. Their eyes meet, and she sees the terror in his. She nods to him and withdraws.

He does slip away, to ice-fish, and he doesn’t come back to camp until that night. He had thought of building an ice house, but it’s one of those two-handed skills that elude him, and he knows the house will be poorly done and take too long. So he takes the risk of coming back, hoping the American has moved on. As he wends through the dark maze of ice and the camp comes into view, he sees a shape rise from the entrance to a tent. It is the woman from before. She holds him still with her eyes, and then the two of them walk together on the ice.

“Your people call me Hannah,” she says in English.

“The people call me Aglooka,” he answers in Inuktitut.

She shrugs, gives him a wry puncturing look, and replies in Inuktitut, “My name is Taqulittuq. My husband and I travel with Mr. George Hall, but we have been in England.”

“Were you shown to people there?” _Exhibited_ , he wants to say. He’s startled, not because she nods, but because she’s apparently been returned in safety.

“I’m an explorer,” she says, with the same gentle, ironic spin; she says _explorer_ in English. “I have seen all of England, and I have dined with your queen. You must be one of the men Mr. Hall is looking for.”

He speaks again in English, as he has not spoken except to himself since he last saw Edward Little. The words are not hesitant. They flood to him, and the language leaps to life like a gas flame. “Who _is_ this Mr. Hall?”

Taqulittuq slips into English too. Her speech is astonishingly fluent. “Mr. Hall is an American who believes he is sent by his God to find survivors from a group of white men. They left fifteen years ago for this part of the world.”

“Fifteen years...?” But he knows it, although his body – that which once was “the stiff pink body,” but has softened to him now, made itself pliable and useful – continues to be as immune to time as it is to scurvy. Year by year, his beard grows whiter, his hair recedes, his hand darkens with wrinkles and veins, but his limbs haven’t weakened, not yet. Even the left arm is strong, for he uses it for everything but gripping.

“Yes. This year is 1860.”

“You don’t seem to take this Hall’s mission very seriously.”

She shrugs. “He is...he cannot help himself.”

“I know the sort of man you mean.”

They sit down on a ridge, giving their feet a rest from the cold. He looks down at the brown fur that coats him, flexes his toes. Something about Taqulittuq makes him feel soothed.

“How did you find England?”

She shakes her head. “People ask me that. How do you find Nunavut?”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” he says again. 

“I think many things about England. But to find the words –” 

“The trouble is,” he says, “the only thing you can talk about is how it’s different from home.”

“I don’t think an explorer has a home,” says Taqulittuq. “We would like to be from nowhere. We would do anything to go, go, go.”

He shakes his head. “I understand, but Nunavut is my home now.”

“Why did you stay?”

“First I was weak,” he said. “And then I was ashamed. And then I came to realize that I am only ever happy – I am rarely happy at all – when I am traveling in the North or the South. With friends, yes?”

“You went to Antarctica?”

“Yes. Years ago.”

“I want to go,” says Taqulittuq, and for the first time her voice is a little bitter. “But the way I travel is by being shown. And there’s no one in Antarctica to see me.”

“You should have a ship,” he says, and turns to her. “In England we only give ships to fools. The captain of our expedition, he was called ‘the man who ate his boots,’ because he tried to walk overland in this part of the world, and half his men died. They ate lichen and moss. And their boots, of course. For that, we made him a hero.”

“Did they give you a ship?” She speaks innocently, questioningly, but he can tell she’s drawing him out.

“Are you going to tell Mr. Hall about me?”

“No. But I want to know which one you are.”

“I am Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier,” he says, hoisting himself on the ridge to face her better; her ironic manner is contagious, and for the first time in twelve years, with the aid of that contagion, he balances his own name on his tongue. “I am a captain in the Royal Navy. Retired,” he adds, drawing the word out. He is evoking the same laborious charm which once marked his drunkenness like a buoy.

“So you are a fool,” says Taqulittuq.

“I’ve had twelve years to contend with what a fool I am. I begin to think now of doing something else.”

“I know a very good agent,” she tells him, “if you want to be exhibited.”

“You should give me his card.”

She puts her mittened hand on the stump of his. She says after a moment, “I don’t want one of your ships. They’re too stiff, and they snap instead of bending. I want a new ship, the shape of my body. I want to swim to Antarctica, and Brazil, and China. For now, after this, I’m going to America.”

“With Mr. Hall?”

“He says he will lecture on us.” She gives a quick shrug. “We can take Mr. Hall away in the morning. No one from your camp has anything for him. They’ve shown him some things from the ships, and your friend Inuksak – he must be your friend – told the story of how you died.”

He gives a sniff of the wet cold air, pulls his hood up close to his face. “Thank you.”

“I will remember you.”

“I’ll remember you, too,” he says, and they embrace.

7.

When he tells Inuksak that he’s leaving, Inuksak embraces him too, and cuffs him in the side of the head. Then he stands back, hair blowing loose in the wind, and regards Aglooka with his usual impassive, assessing stare, as a captain at sea will look over the bow at a storm or a prize. With time, Aglooka reflects, we all grow a little sentimental.

“Where will you go?”

“Southwest,” he says. “I want to see the green places again before I die.”

“Not to your own people?”

“After all this time, you still think of them as my people?”

“Of course,” says Inuksak, and cuffs him again. He supposes he deserves it. This time he embraces Inuksak, and presses his face into the shoulder of his parka, feeling the stiff wiry hairs scratching pleasantly against his eyelids.

He takes his leave of everyone else slowly; he’s in no rush, settling his small sledge, preserving food for the journey, saying goodbye to the land. It is early spring; they have just trekked to the island, and the ice leading to the mainland will be strong for another few weeks at least. He thinks of walking to all the sites one last time – those places where his men starved in the midst of plenty – but in the end, he does not. He knows what they look like, and seeing them will never shift the mass of pitted lead they have left in his chest. He feels the texture of that grief, immutable, digging at his heart.

Finally, the time comes to go, if he is to go at all. He embraces his people once more, tightens the ropes across the sledge, and sets off over the ice. The sun to his right pulls up to sear his skin, but it does not dazzle his eyes; he has snow goggles masking his face, and he sees through a thin line of light. 

As he walks, he feels – what? A buoyancy, a thrill, that makes his eyes wet behind the goggles. He takes them off and tucks them into his collar. The feeling is like a dog leaping, frenzied, its emotions all crude and roughened at the thought of a walk. 

He inhales and knows that the feeling is James Fitzjames. Not the memory of him, not the ghost of him, but the soul of him, hidden in the landscape but burst free of it at last. This is how James felt when he set off on any journey, as if his body had been shot from a cannon, face exultant and arms spread, both prepared and unprepared for the result.

He walks on, weeping, touching the stump of his left wrist to his eyes every little while. He still feels the phantom hand at the end of it, dry and hot, twelve years younger than the other. His arm rises, falls, and then there is another phantom hand grasped in his. He feels the large palm, the smooth fingers, the finely cut nails. He stops, closes his eyes, waits for the feeling to depart, but it does not. And so he walks on.

**Author's Note:**

> I relied on David Woodman's _Unraveling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony_ for most of my facts and historical characters. I took some names and a fact or two from Asen Balikci's 1970 book on the Netsilik, though the book is obviously both dated and out of period, and I suspect that the names will not ring especially true for Netsilik people of the 19th century. Other names were taken from various name sites, with a little due diligence to avoid obvious names from pop culture. This article was helpful in the matter of amulets: http://arcticjournal.ca/arts-culture-education/culture/historical-traditions/. All errors in portraying 19th-centiry Netsilik life are my own. 
> 
> If you haven't read the Woodman book, it's true that the young Crozier picked up the name "Aglooka" in a trade, and that the man he traded with continued to use the name "Crozier," at least with white people.
> 
> Thanks to @attheborder for beta reading!


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